Decision to Apply in Ophthalmology

Background:

To medical students, which specialty to enter is often the most daunting prospect of medical school. Given the divergence of specialties with regard to day-to-day activities, academic content and associated lifestyles, the question of which specialty to pursue is fundamentally inextricable from the question of “what is important in life?” there deriving much of the intimidation with which medical students view it. An additional concern is the near complete dearth of pertinent information about each specialty which is available before actually encountering the specialty during the penultimate year of medical school rotations. The net result, is being faced with a decision which will impact all areas of a student’s future life (geographic location where one will spend the next half decade during residency training, the financial security one’s family will enjoy and the amount of time one will have outside of the hospital) which a student must make with somewhat limited and only recently acquired information. Additionally, the quality of one’s immediate life as a resident is directly impacted by this decision—of particular concern given this period of residency may endure anywhere from 3 to 8 years and corresponds to the time during which a person will most often meet, marry and/or begin a family with their spouse.

Personal:

While those factors weighed heavily, my decision to pursue ophthalmology was also influenced by both my career goals and academic interests. I envisioned a career in a surgically related field with a firm commitment to an ongoing research effort at an academic medical center that hopefully will have a meaningful impact on both the quality of life of my patients as well as on the field itself. Additionally, ophthalmology was appealing given my undergraduate interest in neurobiology. As a student at Harvard University, I had appreciated this field of science as most alluring in my growing fascination with how such abstractions as thought, desire and mental imagery manifest themselves biologically. My graduate studies at Cambridge University (UK) and medical studies at Stanford University further refined my research interests to sensory neurophysiology. These years of basic science research more indelibly revealed retinal function as superlative in its elegance and complimentary to my neurobiology interests. That is, my exposure to the eclectic field of neuro-visual research, including my own studies on the developing retina imparted the intricacy and inescapable allure of the visual system. My future research will, in fact, ideally examine retinal processing on the biophysical level- the goal being to glean insight into the 'language' with which these neurons encode the visual world.

Nevertheless, despite the seeming compatibility of ophthalmology and my academic interests, my uncertainty over a specialty choice lingered into my third year of medical school. I simply wondered whether I would realize the fulfilling and meaningful careers enjoyed by some of my professors or whether my view of medicine would devolve into that of other physicians: as a chore. As every medical field had its share of each, affirmation of my own specialty choice remained daunting.

Additionally, despite my love of science, a career of solely research seemed isolating and distant thus I eagerly anticipated my medical school clerkships. I was not disappointed and my ophthalmology rotation proved the year's highlight. A particularly compelling facet is the field's actualization of my academic interests. Specifically, in their assisting people with serious, often life altering, health issues, my attending ophthalmologists were practicing the science, not merely admiring it from afar (as I had in classes) or studying clinically irrelevant, thus seemingly useless, neural functions (as I sometimes felt with research). They healed while immersed in a subject they truly loved. Ophthalmology's opportunity to perform painstakingly delicate surgeries, without the excessive time demands that would preclude pursuance of meaningful research, was also appealing. Other assets include its potential to vastly improve quality of life among third world citizens and its challenge of confronting the near complete spectrum of systemic illnesses.

Fundamentally, the choice of specialty is most substantially made at the end of one’s third year of medical school. In entering that year, medical students often have a vague conception of their desired career path with several possible specialty choices in mind. After rotating through each specialty, they generally appreciate the broad appeal of either a surgical or a non-surgical specialty. A specific career path is then most often determined by several additional factors most notably the aforementioned overlap of a specialty with one’s research interests, associated specialty lifestyle and the subjective influence of simply how much the student enjoyed that specific clinical rotation in medical school.

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